To its considerable credit, Google has decided to stop running search ads for debt-trap payday loans. This decision, which follows a similar announcement by Facebook last year, closes off an important avenue of customer recruitment for an industry that is doing more and more of its business online. Payday loans, whether made through physical or virtual storefronts, are engineered to suck people into long-term triple-digit-interest debt, making their financial problems worse, not better.

We urge Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies to follow Google’s example, adding their weight to efforts by communities, consumer advocates, and regulators including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to end the abuses of a  quarter-century-long wave of triple-digit-interest, predatory consumer lending.

See briefing paper, Google’s Payday Lending Announcement – What it Means, Why it Matters